Page 52 - WTP Vol. X #7

Iwas freezing, my teeth were chattering and I could not stop shivering. My wife put her hand on
my forehead as she brought me another blanket, “You’re burning up,” she said, and went to get the thermometer: 101.8. “Burning up,” yes, but knowing that didn’t stop me from experiencing what felt like freezing to death.
I had been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, but I’d read that a small percentage of people contracted the virus even so, and I feared I was one of them.
It wasn’t my first scare. One year earlier, back in
the early days of the pandemic, while we were still spraying the mail with disinfectant, leaving our groceries on the porch until we deemed them safe enough for the fridge and pantry, while we watched in horror as people went into the hospital and died without ever seeing their loved ones again, I spiked a fever. It was April Fool’s Day, 2020. I remember that it was raining hard, and I felt sure that on the skylight above my bed I was watching a moonlit private documentary in B&W about my death, a theme running through it that I should have prepared better for this moment.
I was paralyzed with terror. I insisted my wife keep her distance. I was also determined to resist
all distractions, any consolations that would require activity: the books on the nightstand, the headphones, the TV, the cupboard, the fridge, as if looking away, even for a moment, would encourage the virus to deliver the coup de grace. Once, I would have poured bourbon into a mug in a time like this, but that was 30 years earlier, 33 if it matters.
I kept quiet, unmoving, hoping to hear “the still, small
Every angel is terrifying.
— Rilke
voice” that would counsel me or at least console me. All I heard was borborigmi and a frightened pounding in my ears.
I already knew from experience that a moment would come when I would shake my head and laugh at myself. And that then the laugh would turn bitter. And that, before long, I’d be bawling.
I recognized this heartscape from the time I slept upstairs in my old bedroom above my mother dying on the first floor. And from my stoical calm on a
Delta Airlines flight en route to my younger brother’s bedside as he lay dying in the hospital where the two of us were born, that odd laugh escaping just as the plane’s tires grabbed the tarmac, the tears arriving as we taxied to the gate.
But that night I still believed there was something especially meant for me in the drumming on the skylight, so I continued listening. Soon, incessant as the rain, question after question came, water on the dark window gleaming as it branched, a miniature river system of fearful uncertainties. Will Kathi be alright? Did I give it to her, too? Will my youngest grandchildren remember me, or are they too young? What use have I been? Is there anything I should
do to improve my chances of surviving? How can a creature so small as to be invisible take me down?
The fever broke that night. I didn’t have Covid.
But this time, a year later, my doctor’s office closed for the weekend, I was directed to Emergency where I received a Covid test. I expected them to treat me and send me home; I was admitted.
My sodium levels had plummeted, my potassium was low, my body continued to burn with fever. What
was happening to me? “We don’t know,” said the Chief Resident, “that’s why we’re admitting you. Your Covid test was negative.”
I was put on a sodium drip, my blood and urine tested frequently. Nurses woke both me and my roommate on the other side of the curtain several times a night to administer a test to one or the other of us. Daytime started with my companion turning on “The 700 Club” at 6 am. I mentioned it to a nurse drawing blood and she said, “Honey, nobody gets any rest in a hospital.”
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Head of a Pin
ricHard Hoffman